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Patrick Collinson: The Faithful Thomas Cromwell, 29 November 2007

Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister 
by Robert Hutchinson.
Weidenfeld, 360 pp., £20, February 2007, 978 0 297 84642 0
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... to insert a section devoted to the Bering Straits. In the dozen or so years since the death of Geoffrey Elton, the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s prime minister and plenipotentiary, has been similarly airbrushed out of history. Elton, as anyone who did the Tudors for A Levels or read history at Cambridge between 1950 and 1980 knows, made ...

Bad Dads

Zachary Leader, 6 April 1995

In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of a Lost War 
by Tobias Wolff.
Bloomsbury, 210 pp., £12.99, November 1994, 0 7475 1919 6
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Tallien: A Brief Romance 
by Frederic Tuten.
Marion Boyars, 152 pp., £9.95, November 1994, 0 7145 2990 7
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Roommates: My Grandfather’s Story 
by Max Apple.
Little, Brown, 241 pp., £12.99, November 1994, 0 316 91241 7
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... Arthur Saunders Wolff III, aka Saunders Answell-Wolff III, the ‘Duke’ of Tobias’s brother Geoffrey’s memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979). As the memoirs of both Wolff brothers show, the father spent his life shedding past selves and conceiving new ones – as Unitarian, then Episcopalian, as Groton schoolboy, Yale man (in Skull and Bones), Royal ...

Etheric Vibrations

E.S. Turner: Marie Corelli, 29 July 1999

The Mysterious Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers 
by Teresa Ransom.
Sutton, 247 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 7509 1570 6
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... in their stride, along with all those Biblical references. The narrator of The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey Tempest, is a self-pitying failed novelist who receives by the same post the news that he has been left five million pounds and a friendly self-introduction from a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimânez. When the superbly poised Prince arrives, the lights go ...

Vomiting in the marital bed

Carolyn Steedman, 8 November 1990

Road to Divorce, England 1530-1987 
by Lawrence Stone.
Oxford, 460 pp., £19.99, October 1990, 0 19 822651 9
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Late Victorian Britain, 1875-1901 
by J.F.C. Harrison.
Fontana, 265 pp., £5.99, September 1990, 9780006861300
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... in life. But it is difficult to see how it will be used by those students of the family and household, and those taking courses in cultural history who have so successfully learned from that account of 1977, and who will be the consistent and enduring audience for the new book. What looks like a helpful signposting in chapter division and sub-division ...

D&O

John Lanchester, 5 June 1997

Journals 1990-92 
by Anthony Powell.
Heinemann, 238 pp., £20, May 1997, 0 434 00430 8
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... view of things ... He could have passed for a depressed, incurably indolent member of some royal household (there was a look of Prince Theodoric) in hopeless exile.’ Turns up again in 1939 running the Bellevue where Uncle Giles dies, Dr Trelawney gives trouble and General Conyers proposes spending a second honeymoon. Gone forth in his ...

Only Men in Mind

Susan Pedersen: R.H. Tawney, 21 August 2014

The Life of R.H. Tawney 
by Lawrence Goldman.
Bloomsbury, 411 pp., £65, September 2013, 978 1 78093 704 5
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... and edited collections of documents in Tudor economic history. But the two works that made him a household name – The Acquisitive Society, published in 1921, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, based on lectures given at King’s College London in 1922, but only published in 1926 – defy strict categorisation.These two remain worth reading, although ...

Heat-Seeking

Susan Pedersen: A.J.P. Taylor, 10 May 2007

A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe 
by Chris Wrigley.
Tauris, 439 pp., £25, August 2006, 1 86064 286 1
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... taking up some (although much less than one might expect) of his time. But if that work made him a household name, it did nothing for his academic reputation: Hugh Trevor-Roper, not Taylor, was appointed regius professor in 1957. Quick to feel slighted, Taylor became ever more populist, and for a time limited his commitments at Oxford in order to direct the ...

William Rodgers reads the papers

William Rodgers, 19 February 1987

The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the 20th Century 
by Simon Jenkins.
Faber, 247 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 571 14627 9
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The End of the Street 
by Linda Melvern.
Methuen, 276 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 413 14640 5
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... and an op-ed page without a policy. Only the charm of its obituaries is undiminished although Geoffrey Smith continues to write a wise if ponderous political column. Which leaves the Financial Times, the Independent and the Guardian. The Financial Times is a very good paper. It has replaced the Times in the authority of its features and the influence of ...

Ruin it your own way

Susan Pedersen, 4 June 2020

Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution 
by Selina Todd.
Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5
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A Taste of Honey 
by Shelagh Delaney.
Methuen, 112 pp., £14.44, November 2019, 978 1 350 13495 9
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... all sorts of woman,’ Jo says – and so is Jo. ‘My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it.’I can’t think of another play that gives such an unvarnished portrait of the exigencies of motherhood: of what mothers give and resent giving, of what daughters learn and hate learning. Helen isn’t what Donald ...

Tooloose-Lowrytrek

Elizabeth Lowry: Malcolm Lowry, 1 November 2007

The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words 
edited by Michael Hofmann.
NYRB, 518 pp., £16.99, November 2007, 978 1 59017 235 3
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... a week … if you would tolerate me for any period you like to name … as a member of your household’. Aiken accepted the role of literary mentor, and Lowry’s father, a Methodist Liverpool cotton broker who was already alarmed at his youngest son’s taste for alcohol and eager to see him usefully occupied, willingly came up with the money to send ...

English Individualism Revisited

Alan Ryan, 21 January 1988

The Culture of Capitalism 
by Alan Macfarlane.
Blackwell, 254 pp., £19.50, August 1987, 0 631 13626 6
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... displays all or most of the following features: the basic social and economic unit is the extended household, production and consumption alike taking place there; villages are self-sufficient, economic rationality is limited, and families are deeply attached to particular pieces of land; social and geographical mobility are thus limited, families rise and fall ...

Blackfell’s Scarlatti

August Kleinzahler: Basil Bunting, 21 January 1999

The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting 
by Keith Alldritt.
Aurum, 221 pp., £19.95, October 1998, 1 85410 477 2
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... of the coal miners who made up a good share of his practice. The politics argued in the household with men like Graham Wallas were decidedly anti-capitalist. Basil’s parents were also members of Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Society. As a local journalist many years later, Basil Bunting could be found on wet lunchtimes in the Lit and ...

Lost Jokes

Alan Bennett, 2 August 1984

... NW1. This was a period when stripped pine was in its infancy and the customary objects of such a household – the jelly moulds, the cane carpet-beaters, the Seth Thomas clocks and Asian Pheasant plates – were still unexplored, tallboys unstripped and the nightdress potential of Edwardian shrouds not yet fully exploited. My own house was of course stuffed ...

In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled

Stefan Collini: ‘Cosmo’ for Capitalists, 6 February 2020

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ 
by Alexander Zevin.
Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9
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... capitalism (having made more cautious moves in this direction under the long editorship of Geoffrey Crowther between 1938 and 1956). In 1965, an article proclaimed the US ‘the most internationally responsible country in the world’, at a time when, as Alexander Zevin points out in Liberalism at Large, it was demonstrating this responsibility by ...

A Man It Would Be Unwise to Cross

Stephen Alford: Thomas Cromwell, 8 November 2018

Thomas Cromwell: A Life 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 752 pp., £30, September 2018, 978 1 84614 429 5
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... with an adjective: ‘sinister’ and ‘Machiavellian’ used to be two of the most common. As Geoffrey Elton wrote in 1953, ‘We do not call a man sinister whom we know well, whether we like him or not.’ But Elton merely restates the problem. How do we get to know Thomas Cromwell in the first place? The answer is by a painstaking forensic recovery of ...

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